Over 130 years ago, the Southern Pacific Railroad Company pulled off a major victory for the private market in its lawsuit against Santa Clara, California. Essentially, the case established that the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment applied to corporations just as much as people, setting the stage for a legal concept known as “corporate personhood.”
The United States — and indeed, the world — is still ruled by this archaic principle, which empowers powerful tech corporations to flaunt basic government regulations citing the same protections enjoyed by private citizens. This manifests in the way companies mine private consumer data, deny employees healthcare, defy public health initiatives — and, of course, exert massive influence in elections.
Sure enough, Supreme Court cases involving private companies overwhelmingly shake out in favor of moneyed interests as a result corporate personhood. Yet if corporations are people — who in many US states are still subject to the death penalty — then can’t we technically sentence companies that commit egregious crimes to capital punishment?
In theory, we can. As Salon observed, the concept of a corporate death penalty, officially known as “judicial dissolution,” has roots going back nearly just as far as corporate personhood.
